The present invention relates to transferring digital images over the Internet, and more particularly to providing an architecture for integrating photo-service-based websites for access by client devices.
As the popularity of digital cameras grows, the desire of digital camera users to share their images with others will also continue to grow. The best approaches to photo-sharing take advantage of the Internet. One such approach is for users to store the digital images on a PC and then send the images to others using email. Several Internet companies now offer an even more convenient approach by providing photo-sharing websites that allow users to store their images for free and to arrange the images into web-based photo albums. Once posted on a photo-sharing website, others may view the images over the Internet.
While convenient for storing digital images, getting the images to the photo-sharing websites can be challenging for users. Most commonly, users must upload their images from the digital camera to a PC using a cable or IrDA, or by inserting the camera""s flash card into the PC. From the PC, the user logs onto the Internet and uploads the images to a photo-sharing website. After uploading the images, the user works on the website to arrange the images into web albums and to add any textual information.
The assignee of the present application developed an approach to uploading images to the web that does not require the use of a PC. In this approach, an email software application is loaded into a digital camera capable of running software that allows the user to e-mail the images directly from the camera. The user simply connects his or her digital camera to a cellphone or modem, runs the e-mail application, and selects the desired images and the email recipients. The selected images are then sent to the recipients as e-mail attachments.
Although emailing photos directly from the camera allows users who do not own a PC to share images over the Internet, these users must still establish accounts with both an Internet service provider (ISP) and the photo-sharing website before being able to post their images. Cameras are not designed for text entry, and the information required may be somewhat technical in nature. Consequently, establishing the accounts by entering account and configuration data on the digital camera itself may prove to be a difficult task for most users.
The assignee of the present invention has developed another technique for uploading images to the Internet, which does not require the user to enter configuration data, as described in U.S. Pat. Application Ser. No. 09/625,824entitled xe2x80x9cMethod And System For Automatically Configuring A Hand-Held Electronic Device For Accessing A Site On A Public Networkxe2x80x9d filed on Jul. 26, 2000.
In this system, cameras connect to a gateway server on the Internet via a service provider, which may include a wireless carrier and/or an Internet service provider (ISP). In order to create a camera that requires no configuration to connect to the Internet, the camera is provided with a software application that is pre-configured to establish communication with the ISP and the gateway server. The first time the camera establishes communication, the camera sends information uniquely identifying the electronic device to the gateway server. The server then sends user account information to the device, including an account ID and password, created based on the electronic device information. The user account information is then stored on the camera for use the next time the electronic device accesses the website. Thus, the user does not have to enter account information in order to establish the ISP connection or the website account before accessing the Internet.
The gateway performs two basic services for the client. First, it is the camera""s home base, which provides authentication services (user and device) and configuration services (it updates the camera""s configuration, so the user doesn""t have to). Second, it receives and responds to the camera application""s requests using a protocol both understand. Services available to a camera may include the ability to send images from the camera to a specific photo-service service and the ability to send emails with links to uploaded images.
The current gateway solution is built on traditional client-server architecture, where a software application on the camera communicates with a software application on the server. Client-server architecture requires custom software on all three tiers of the current architecture; the camera, the gateway, and the photo-service site. In addition, the current gateway solution only enables communication with digital cameras, not other mobile devices.
A newer model for application deployment on the Internet today is server-based (i.e., ASP model), where a client device equipped with a web browser communicates with a web server. Browser-based devices simply download web pages from the server, which provides the application function and data. The deployment of applications using this new server-based architecture is growing much faster than the deployment of client-server based applications because browser-based clients do not require a gateway that xe2x80x9cspeaksxe2x80x9d the client application""s protocol. Thus, browser-based clients may connect to the photo-service sites directly, since the devices are browser-based. In addition, browser-based clients also do not require embedded custom software for requesting imaging services from the photo-service sites. Instead, once connected, users of these devices could interact with the photo-services sites directly using the device""s browser, if the sites support the specific browsers in these devices, or indirectly via a transcoding gateway.
A transcoding gateway converts the sites"" HTML to a format suitable for the various browser types. Transcoding products exist today that can support multiple browser-based clients that are both wireless and wired. Transcoding technology takes a formatted input stream (typically HTML) from a web server and converts it to an output stream in another format (e.g., WML for WAP phones, cHTML for i-mode phones, etc) of a particular type of browser-based device. Digital cameras will soon be equipped with browsers, just as PDA""s and cellphones are, and such transcoding products allow, or soon will allow, browser-based devices to access the images and image services of photo-services sites.
The primary impediment to making these services available from the photo-service sites is the effort required to make the presentation of these services palatable to the various types of browser-based devices, given the variety of display characteristics and browser technologies. There are two approaches to addressing this presentation problem.
One approach is for each photo-host site to build custom web pages for each specific device/browser type. That is, the host site would need to provide web pages formatted in HTML, WML, cHTML, and so on, and preprocess images to suit the device display capabilities. This is both labor intensive to initially setup and difficult to maintain as changes are made to the site""s data and services.
A second approach, is to use a transcoding product, such as a WAP gateway or Oracle""s Portal-to-Go. The problem with the transcoder approach is that it tries to solve a very broad problem, making all HTML encoded information presentable in a number of other different formats. Consequently, transcoders often produce unsatisfactory results. Transcoders thus serve as a temporary solution while photo-service sites build support for each of the various devices directly into their sites.
As digital imaging grows in popularity, there will be a need for disparate photo-service sites to integrate their offerings (e.g., photo-hosting from one, and printing from another). This requires that two photo sites wishing to become partners must each enable their sites to communicate. Neither of the two approaches described above addresses the requirement of integrating the services that span the sites of multiple photo-service providers. Since there is no standard for inter-site communication for photo-service sites, this effort must be undertaken for each new partner a site agrees to work with.
Accordingly, what is needed is an Internet offering that integrates services that span the sites of multiple photo-service providers and that may be used with either browser-based or browser-less client devices. The present invention addresses such a need.
The present invention provides a meta-application architecture for integrating online photo-service websites. The online system includes a plurality of client devices capable of storing and displaying digital images, wherein a portion of the client devices communicate data in different formats. The system also includes a plurality of online photo-service sites, wherein each of the photo-service sites utilize different data models. The online system further includes a server for communicating with both the client devices and the photo-service sites over a network. A meta-application is also provided that is accessible by the server for defining a common data model format for the different formats of the photo-service sites. In operation, when a request is received from a client device for photo-services from a particular photo-service site, the request is passed to the photo-service site. When a response from the photo-service site is received, the response is converted from the data model of the photo-service site to the common data model format, and the converted request is then presented to the requesting client device in the data format required by the requesting client device.
According to the present invention, the meta-application architecture integrates the services of photo-service sites for access by client devices and frees photo-service sites from some of the complexities of dealing with non-PC devices, such as digital cameras. The meta-application architecture is also capable of integrating the imaging services associated any other type of vertical business segment that uses and shares digital images, and provides a more efficient mechanism for getting needed images into such business workflows.